WHO: Europe now has more than 10 million COVID-19 cases
LONDON (AP) — The World Health Organization’s Europe director said Thursday that the 54-country region has again reached a new weekly record for confirmed cases, with more than 1.5 confirmed last week and more than 10 million since the start of the pandemic.
During a meeting with European health ministers, WHO European regional director Dr. Hans Kluge said, “hospitalizations have risen to levels unseen since the spring” and that deaths have risen by more than 30% in the last week.
“Europe is at the epicenter of this pandemic once again,” Kluge said. “At the risk of sounding alarmist, I must express our very real concern.”
Testing systems have been unable to keep up with widespread levels of transmission, and “test positivity levels have reached new highs,” with most European countries exceeding 5% and many cases spreading unchecked, he said.
Along with the usual European countries, WHO includes includes Russia and some central Asian countries like Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan in its Europe region.
In the wake of France and Germany approving new restrictions in hopes of reversing the trend, Kluge called national lockdowns a “last resort option,” citing the considerable damage the measures inflict on economies, people's mental health and the incidence of domestic violence.
He said lockdowns should give countries the chance to “recoup and scale up” so they can theoretically strengthen their health systems and contact tracing programs to quickly identify and stamp out new clusters.
But numerous countries across Europe such as Britain, failed to do so. Despite the U.K.'s nationwide lockdown earlier this year, the country's contact tracing system remains unable to track down a significant percentage of the contacts of...
